JQuery and performance
This is just a collection of links to interesting posts:
http://jquery-howto.blogspot.com/2009/02/5-easy-tips-on-how-to-improve-code.html
http://paulirish.com/2009/perf/
http://www.artzstudio.com/2009/04/jquery-performance-rules/
"Autoloader" – load the nodes when requested.
("virtual rendering")
http://github.com/mleibman/slickgrid
http://plugins2.jquery.com/project/GridNic (Seems to be the same, the author is definitely the same! This one has PDF / Word / Excel export capabilities.)
Speed Comparison
http://paulirish.com/2009/perf/
http://mootools.net/slickspeed/ (Old versions of JQuery used!)
http://dante.dojotoolkit.org/taskspeed/ This is a more up-to-date version
=> JQuery 1.4.2 yields significant performance gains over JQuery 1.4.1
Storing Data locally